Kalyanam Shivkumar

Distinguished Professor of Medicine (Cardiology), Radiology & Bioengineering — UCLA
Founding Leader, UCLA Cardiac Arrhythmia & Neurocardiology Programs

Dr. Kalyanam Shivkumar is a globally recognized physician-scientist whose work lies at the frontier of neurocardiology and interventional electrophysiology. He holds joint faculty appointments in Medicine (Cardiology), Radiology, and Bioengineering at UCLA.

He earned his medical degree from the University of Madras, India, in 1991 and later obtained his PhD in Physiology from UCLA in 2000. His postgraduate training includes a cardiology fellowship at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai, followed by an electrophysiology fellowship in Los Angeles.

In 2002, Dr. Shivkumar was recruited to establish the UCLA Cardiac Arrhythmia Center and led it from its inception through 2025 as its inaugural director. Under his leadership, the Neurocardiology Research Program of Excellence was founded in 2014 as the research arm of the Arrhythmia Center.

His clinical specialization lies in interventional cardiac electrophysiology, with a focus on pioneering non-pharmacological approaches to arrhythmia management — especially techniques incorporating neuromodulation, autonomic modulation, and integrative cardiac–neural interfaces.

Dr. Shivkumar’s research is expansive and high-impact. His group investigates human mechanistic models of cardiac arrhythmias with a particular focus on neural control of electrophysiology. He leads a major NIH Program Project Grant on cardiac arrhythmia mechanisms and directs a Leducq International Consortium Network in bioelectric neuromodulation. His innovations have also translated into intellectual property embedded in FDA-approved devices.

Dr. Shivkumar has won numerous honors: election as a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Association of University Cardiologists, and the Association of American Physicians; appointment as Editor-in-Chief of JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology since 2020; and honorary fellowship in the Royal College of Physicians (London).

He also founded the Amara-Yad Project, an open-access digital platform for medical education, reflecting his commitment to democratizing knowledge.

As part of the Brain & Heart Symposium, Dr. Shivkumar brings deep mechanistic insight into how the neural architecture interfaces with cardiac electrophysiology — illuminating paths for innovation and therapy at the brain–heart crossroad.